Things mostly went very well, and we've released Debian 9 this
weekend past. Many many people worked together to
make this possible, and I'd like to extend my own thanks to all of
them.

As a project, we decided to dedicate Stretch to our late founder
Ian Murdock. He did much of the early work to get Debian going, and
inspired many more to help him. I had the good fortune to meet up with
Ian years ago at a meetup attached to a Usenix conference, and I
remember clearly he was a genuinely nice guy with good ideas. We'll
miss him.

For my part in the release process, again I was responsible for
producing our official installation and live images. Release day
itself went OK, but as is typical the process ran late into Saturday
night / early Sunday morning. We made and tested lots
of different images, although numbers were down from previous releases
as we've stopped making the full CD sets now.

Sunday was the day for the release party in Cambridge. As is
traditional, a group of us met up at a local hostelry for some
revelry! We hid inside the pub to escape from the ridiculouly hot
weather we're having at the moment.

Due to a combination of the lack of sleep and the heat, I nearly
forgot to even take any photos - apologies to the extra folks who'd
been around earlier whom I missed with the camera... :-(

Seriously, the cacophony of silence from the Linux-aware community is strangely eerie.

Make no mistake, this was a huge undertaking, undertook by a lot of very talented people that pulled off a ridiculously successful threading of a LOT of downstream needles. What happens in Debian influences all of Linux, and thereby the entirety of the world both on and off the internet.

We don't read news stories about when schools full of children drink everyday from fountains dispensing pure water activated with only a button, or when thousands of people are able to safely gather at one place in the dead of night because its lit by electrically powered illumination. We don't read about these miracles despite the fact that their occurrences are literally unprecedented in 99% of human existence. We only read about it when it doesn't happen.

Perhaps, to no doubt a much smaller degree, that is where Debian is now. Perhaps the greatest testament to the Debian team is how little everyone is talking about the latest successful release of Debian Stable.

Great job folks. In your own way, you've steered the world more than most. This user is in your debt.

And I happened to be up until 0330 anyway - waiting to be a taxi service - so it was fun to just take images and try them. Wish I could have been there with you to sink a pint of lemonade with the Cambridge intelligentsia :)